As she slept he had wondered how she came to be in town. Why had she left her village? How had she joined the most famous of all the street girl groups, the Green Coffee Girls?
She was embarrassed by the recognition. The shared memory of her brother Vinh, with him in the same platoon, at M’Drac battlefield with him, was with them both. And of their only other sad meeting.
After the war Kien had taken his mate’s last possessions to Vinh’s family, in a hamlet on the outer edges of Hanoi. The landscape was half marsh, half rubbish dump. The scrawny children wore rags. Dirty dogs ran here and there and the flies, mosquitoes and rats were numerous and evident. The hamlet’s inhabitants were semi-beggars, gathering garbage for their meagre living, and there were small dumps of obviously stolen goods lining the paths where thieves had set up tiny stalls.
Someone pointed out Vinh’s family house to Kien. It was like all the others, a shanty of tin and old timber, surrounded by garbage. Vinh’s little sister was barely fifteen then. Her eyes had swollen and sent tears down her cheeks as she recognised her brother’s knapsack and his personal belongings. There was no need to ask why Kien had come to visit them. The sad news was there for them to touch. Vinh’s blind mother sat with the girl, feeling the items as she handed them over. A cloth hat. A folded knife. An iron bowl. A broken flute. A notebook. When Kien rose to leave the old lady had reached up and touched his cheek. ‘At least you came back,’ she said quietly.
He stared at the little sister, now naked in his bed, a blanket wrapped around her shoulders. He had forgotten her name and was now too embarrassed to ask. She began to speak, quietly: ‘My mother died that same year. I stopped collecting garbage. In fact the dump doesn’t even exist now. I came to town, alone.’
They each spilled their stories, talking throughout the morning. She in bed, he beside it. Kien found some rice then fried it over his kerosene stove, and they shared a small meal. She rested again.
Later, she opened her eyes, looking over to him with a small smile. She reached out and began tugging his arm, inviting him to slide in beside her. Kien held back.
‘Come on, please. You saved me,’ she said.
When Kien declined again, she seemed thankful and didn’t persist. ‘You’re funny,’ she said. ‘Strange, I mean.’
Kien moved around the room picking up anything of value he could find. Paper money, lottery tickets, anything. After she’d dressed and was preparing to leave he handed her the money and the tickets. She started laughing gaily, but took them. He saw her out into the street and back up to the Thuyen Quang lake, where he had helped her the long night before. ‘You’d better make yourself scarce,’ she told him. ‘People will jump to wrong conclusions if they see you with me. I’ll never forget you, though. You’re really nice, and strange.’
The girl withdrew her hand and walked away. He felt so dry, so vulgar, so impotent and spent. The result of those months and years at war.
He was at a stage when he had no idea how he would spend the rest of his life. Study? Career? Business? All those things he had once considered important, and attainable, suddenly seemed meaningless and beyond his reach. He was still alive – just. He had no idea of how he would earn his daily living. It was a time of utter isolation, of spiritual emptiness, of surrender.
Yet the city was now coming alive again, this time in a synthetically generated frenzy of patriotism. Another war was about to break out! Pol Pot had been chased out of Cambodia by Vietnamese troops and because of that Pol Pot’s allies, the Chinese, were threatening Vietnam’s northern border. This would be another turning-point in their lives. Kien’s friends emerged to advise him to rejoin the army. Long live his career! Long live the army of Vietnam! A good soldier would always be invaluable, they said. That went on for weeks.
In the streets, on the trains, in offices, in shops, in teahouses and beer gardens, the talk once more was of fighting and weapons. Passionate discussions on the situation on the northern border, with China threatening to invade because of their humiliation in losing Pol Pot, removed from power in Cambodia by the glorious Vietnamese Army.
And night after night express trains packed with soldiers rumbled through Hanoi on the way to the northern front. Tanks and guns were jammed into goods wagons, compartments were filled with young soldiers, and the smell of soldiers’ sweat wafted out from train doors and windows. Kien caught the familiar smell of excited fear, of young men soon to be burdened with hardships, bullets and blasting, hunger and cold. This time on the northern border.
‘Just like old times, eh?’ said someone in the crowd close by. ‘Like in 1965 in the early days against the Americans,’ the rich city people commented.
‘At least we’re much stronger compared to those days,’ others commented, confident of another victory.
Kien listened, thinking they might be right. But he knew it wasn’t true that young Vietnamese loved war. Not true at all. If war came they would fight, and fight courageously. But that didn’t mean they loved fighting.
No. The ones who loved war were not the young men, but the others like the politicians, middle-aged men with fat bellies and short legs. Not the ordinary people. The recent years of war had brought enough suffering and pain to last them a thousand years.
Kien wasn’t involved in this new war. For him there had been just the one war, the one which had involved the Americans. That had been the final war as far as he was concerned. It was the one which now determined all events in his life; the happiness, the unhappiness, the joys, the sorrows, the loves, the hatreds.
It was that spring which had begun so sadly, so inauspiciously, with his country once more on the brink of war, when something moved within Kien’s heart, taking him from turmoil to peace. Something inside him, powerful and urgent, pumped life back into his collapsed spirit and snapped life back into him. It felt like love. Perhaps it was recognition of some wonderful truth deep inside him.
That same chilly dark spring night Kien started to write his first novel.
Kien returned home to find Tran Sinh, a former classmate of his and Phuong’s, lying in agony. Sinh had been in hospital for months but had now been sent home to await death. The time to die had come.
Sinh had been home in his first-floor room for two days now, awaiting death. He had joined the army after Kien but was wounded, then demobilised, before Kien. At first, when Sinh returned home, he had not looked like an invalid. He even planned to marry.
But, day after day, paralysis crept over his body, first travelling down his left leg, then his right, then along his trunk. By the time Kien was demobilised Sinh was walking with the help of a walking-stick, but within a short time his health had deteriorated further and he was confined to his bed. The doctors wondered how he had survived his terrible spinal wound, surprised he had not been killed outright. Instead, Sinh had lived and his suffering had been prolonged. ‘Incurable,’ the doctors had said. The more they tried to help him the worse matters became for him and the relatives caring for him, and this unhappy situation continued for four years.
Sinh’s parents had died. His brother had married and left. Sinh was left in the room at the end of the corridor on the first floor, a room dark and wet, with its only window facing the toilet. Kien pushed the door open and stepped in. Through the dim light he saw two children and a thin woman, Sinh’s sister-in-law, sitting on the floor assembling cartons for the local biscuit factory, earning a little extra money. None of them looked up.